Be it your Company Website

Be it your company website, online shop or personal blog,

you need a reliable hosting provider. But not everyone is familiar with IT

specifications. Even for IT savvy people, there are many areas unknown when it

comes to choosing a hosting company.

Here, we provide you a list of criterias to consider. These are based on our own

experience, from moving from host to host until we finally set up our own

hosting company.

1. Price – yes, this is important. Anything around S$100 per year is reasonable.

Don’t get those that offer less than S$50 per year. Because these host typically

overload their servers. To run a server, it cost around $10k per year. That

means a hosting company can easily put 200 domains in one server, charge S$100

each (S$20k return). 200 domains per server is ok. But imagine if it is priced

at S$50, then a hosting company must put in 400 domains. Thus result in

overloading

2. Utilisation – you are sharing a server with a few hundred others. Make sure

the server is less than 60% utilised (in terms of space, RAM and CPU). 90%

utilisation will make the server very very slow.

3. Space and data transfer. You don’t want to get a bill at end of each month

because of extra traffic.

4. Location. Get one that is in the same time zone. So if you are based in US,

get a US server. If you are based in Asia, get an Asia server. If you are based

in asia and you have US server, you might experience unexpected downtime. US

server do maintenance in their night time, which means during your morning time.

This is very bad especially for business website.

5. Support – try calling their phone number and send emails. See how fast do

they response. I have one customers who switch to me because their current host

cannot be reached by any means. All phone no are not in used. So, it is a bit

dangerous to go with a host that you can’t reach.

6. Domain name – beware of all these free domain name promotions. Many of the

host will put their own name as the owner of the domain. By the time your domain

get popular, you are stuck with them. Or, in my client’s case, the hosting

company close shop. So they loose the domain name that they have been using for

5 years.

7. features – i am not talking about blog or osCommerce shopping cart etc etc.

All of these you can download and install yourself. Web hosting package these in

just to make you feel good. Look at things like

- no of email account

- no of sub domain

- scalability – can you upgrade to next plan easily?

- MySQL or MS SQL – very important if you want to run blog or forum or free php

programs.

- programming language support – php, asp.net

- antispam – this is a must have!

8. money-back guarantee – a reliable host will give you 30-day money-back

guarantee. if you don’t like the host, you can get 100% refund within the 1st 30

days.

9. uptime – no server will be 100% up because there are maintenance to be done,

or sometimes Windows hang (microsoft problem, nothing we can do). 99.9% uptime

per year is ok.

10. transparency – some host give you 1st year $50 then 2nd year $100. Or domain

1st year $18, 2nd year $30. So beware. Too cheap is hard to believe, and you

better trust your instincts. Try to find a hosting with price freeze. That means

price will never increase.

11. technology – look for a company that deploy industry standard control panel

and technology. That will make your life easier to load programs and manage your

hosting (such as creating email address, do backup, create sub-domain etc etc).

For windows, look for PLESK; for linux, look for direct admin/cpanel. Companies

who has these control panel can response faster to problem and generally show

that they are serious in hosting business

HK Loo is the owner of

Netsarius LLP, a one-stop design and web solutions company in Singapore. He has

been in Internet line since year 1997, almost 10 years now as a professional web

developer; Lowest Domain and Hosting Services from http://www.yoursdomain.com

About the Author

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